For this cause, her sole remaining brother had become little more than a memory and a monthly letter. Yet could she never account herself a lonely woman, while she had Keith for friend and mentor, Mark for son, and Sheila for—more than possible—daughter. What business had this unknown girl to step into their charmed circle and unsettle the very foundation of things? Never, till to-night, had it seemed possible to Mark’s mother that she could arrive at dreading the fulfilment of his heart’s desire. Yet that was what it amounted to. Dread lurked behind her surface irritation. The touch of second sight in her composition made her vaguely conscious of danger in the air. Small wonder if she anathematised Maurice Lenox for his knack of picking up promiscuous strangers, and, in this case, aggravating his offence by failing to appropriate his own discovery.
CHAPTER II.
Quand on vous voit, on vous aime; quand on vous aime, où vous voit-on?
For a while the two boats kept in touch, so that talk passed easily between them. Miss Alison spoke little. Silence rather became the fair pensive quality of her charm—and probably she knew it. The uncharitable supposition was Lady Forsyth’s: and she was fain to confess that pensiveness and silence harmonised well with the fine, straight nose, the mass of dull gold hair, and eyes of that transparent blue which lacks warmth and depth, yet has a limpid beauty of its own, especially where the pupils are large and the lashes noticeably long.
Mark, too, had fallen silent: the worst possible sign. But Miss O’Neill atoned for all deficiencies by discoursing vigorously to Maurice’s swaying shoulders, upon the latest developments of the suffrage campaign. Maurice, equal to any emergency, had no difficulty in airing his own views on the subject—as it were, through the back of his head—to one who had hammered shop windows with her own hand, though she graciously drew the line at firing churches and wrecking trains. Yet she was a woman of generous and, at times, noble impulses. The greater part of her small annuity was lavished on a very personal form of rescue work—and on Bel.
‘It’s rank injustice, say what you please,’ she declared in her strong, vibrant tones, ‘to imprison and torture poor misguided girls who have the courage of the faith that’s in them. The real blame lies on the heads of those who’ve driven us to extremes.’
‘That sounds very fine, Miss O’Neill, but I’m afraid it won’t hold water,’ Macnair put in quietly from the other boat. ‘It has been the standing excuse of fanatics and—dare I add?—criminals all down the ages. Your latest forms of argument will simply harden and justify opposition to a cause that is not without certain elements of justice and right.’
His pleasant voice had the clear, leisured enunciation of the scholar, a quality peculiarly exasperating to the red-hot enthusiast whose thoughts are, in the main, emotions intellectually expressed. ‘Justice and right indeed!’ Miss O’Neill fairly hurled the words at him. ‘That’s all we’re asking, isn’t it? And precisely what we’ll never be getting under a man-made Government and man-made laws.’
Macnair smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He had no mind to let argument and recrimination desecrate the peace and glowing beauty of a Highland summer evening; and with practised ease he slid into the calmer waters of generalisation, as much in the hope of weaning Lady Forsyth from troubled thoughts as for the pleasure of expressing his own.
‘The truth is,’ he said, resting on his oars, while the boats drifted into a luminous bay, ‘every age, like every country, has its moral microbe; and the microbe of this one is “Down with everything”; “Can’t; won’t; shan’t; don’t; Pass it along the line,” that’s about the tune of it, in all ranks. Kipling may or may not be a classic poet, but his “Commissariat Camels” put the present-day spirit into a nutshell. For nearly a hundred years the world has been fed on a steady diet of revolt; and now we have the climax, distaste for duties and clamour for rights. The fine, brave old wisdom of acceptance is altogether out of court⸺’